I needed 5 paintings to send to a jury for a show. I had 3 paintings on hand, two were unfinished. So, I revised those three, but I needed two more. This may reveal more about myself than I care to reveal, but I had produce two paintings. I had been listening to a conversation with George Saunders, the writer and teacher talking with Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist. Near the end of the conversation, Saunders talked about what he says to his students about writing, but they also seemed to apply to painting. You cannot truncate yourself, he said, but just use everything you have in writing, including the negative.

This got me to wondering about the things I have left aside, and there are many, that I could use today. Recursion is what I am thinking of an artist taking something from the past and bringing it up to the present to move forward. There is a painting I made when I was a nineteen-year-old art student that has miraculously survived, the only one that has survived that I still have in my studio. Sometime in the early 2000s my father revised the painting, a story I will tell in another blog. But for the moment, the painting gave an excellent example of something I had never thought of doing, making it again, that is a recursion. In doing so, I discovered something else George Saunders said, if you redo something you had always thought of as negative and it takes off, it works, then that is the truth.

Another work is a cut paper collage that I glued onto canvas. I started the piece in the basement of my parent’s house in suburban Detroit (I was living there at the time helping my mother who had just tuned 90). A work like this does not come out of nowhere, I had spent a lot of time at the Crow Barn in Ohio where my aunt teaches quilt art. There, I had experiences with color and design enlarging my sense of possibility about color having its own independent reality. These ideas found their way into this piece.

The other 3 paintings were already underway in various sates of finish. They are autobiographical in that they depict in imaginative ways my existence living in the country, a rural place, after spending much of my life in the city. I do not know what to say about them other than they are my attempt at saying something, a statement about rural life. They fall short of that ambition. My favorite is the one titled, “Pastoral,” perhaps because it comes closest to something Philip Guston said about the image, “So imagery is endless. The image thing and pursuing the image is endless. It changes you.” When I stopped on this painting I just left it, though I marveled at where the cartoon-like head near the bottom had come from. I have enough idea.

Look, I Made a Hat, oil on canvas, 84″ x 58″, 2026

Artwork copyright, Peter Crow, 2026.